This is the second part in the series of tutorials showing how to add dynamic, interactive, data-driven charts to your ASP.NET web applications. These tutorials use amCharts Flash charting components and "ASP.NET Controls for amCharts" for ASP.NET integration.

In the first part of the series we have looked at how to setup your Visual Studio environment to use amCharts and how to add a simple pie chart based on static data. That was easy but by using such dynamic environments as ASP.NET and Adobe Flash most likely you weren't looking for a way to display static hard-coded data. So in this part we will look at how to bind our pie chart to a real data source plus we will cover a couple of visual enhancement options.

Pie chart looking from data binding point is the simplest of all chart forms (at least in amCharts lineup). Column, Line and XY charts can have more than one graph drawn on a single chart but Pie chart can't. This makes it a perfect starting point to learn how to bind amCharts to data.

Data source

We will be using sample Northwind database included with MS SQL Server. Unfortunately it's not included with SQL Server Express Edition but here's an article on how to set it up with Express. You can use MS Access version of Northwind if you like.

We will start by adding a new Web Form page to our web site. Let's call it DataboundPieChart.aspx. First we will add an SqlDataSource object to our page by dragging and dropping it from the toolbox

Now we need to configure it. Press "Configure Data Source..." link in the Smart Tag and configuration dialog will appear.

Create a new connection to your SQL Server or select an existing connection from the dropdown and press "Next". Let's save the connection string in web.config for future reference

Let's call it "NorthwindConnectionString" and press "Next". Now we need to select a table or view containing our data.

We will use the one called "Category Sales for 1997". On the next screen we just press "Test" to make sure that our simple query works and press "Finish".

Let's rename the data source from generic SqlDataSource1 to a more meaningful CategorySalesSource

Data-bound pie chart

Now that we have our data source configured, it's time to add a pie chart by drag-n-dropping the PieChart control from the toolbox. All we need to do is to specify our datasource object and associate the fields in datasource with chart properties.

We set DataSourceID to CategorySalesSource, DataTitleField (this would be the title of a pie slice) to CategoryName and DataValueField to CategorySales. And that basically it.

One more thing we want to do is disable chart legend because there will be too much slices in our chart and the legend would take too much space without making much sense. To do that we set LegendEnabled property to false.

Now if we run our project our pie chart would look like this

Some tweaks

Default chart looks just fine but suppose we want to add a little 3D effect to it. This is done by setting the PieAngle property to a value different from 0

We've also set PieHeight property so our pie has some volume and decided to make it a donut instead of a pie by setting PieInnerRadius to 30 (in other words this is the radius of the hole).

One more thing we want to do is highlight our top selling categories by grouping our slow-sellers into one slice called "Others". To do that we set grouping properties to group all the slices with value less than 10% of the total into one slice. This is done by setting GroupPercent property to 10.

Let's make the others slice pulled out of the donut on load. Set GroupPullOut to true.

Let's run the project and see what we got. This is a screenshot of our pie with mouse hovering over the "Confections" slice.

That's it for Today. In the next part we will talk about feeding the data to our chart from external data source and forcing the chart to refresh itself every now and then.

P.S.: thanks for linking, "kicking" and promoting these tutorials in other ways!